The Happy Luddite

During autumn, I spend a lot of my time honing our message for the Sugarbush Ski & Ride School. Hiring our staff, putting the finishing touches on new products, writing copy for the website and all manner of marketing materials, and developing the training focus for our staff for the season may seem like a lot of unrelated ministerial work, but it does help me put who we are and where I want us to go into clearer focus. One theme that is a constant in all aspects of what we do, that is an indelible part of our message, is the concept of ‘modern’ – modern skiing and riding, modern equipment, modern teaching, a modern experience for our guests. Can you imagine a resort or a teaching staff boasting about their antiquated methodology? There are some resorts for whom that might apply, some schools, and definitely some instructors. ‘Here at Mount Luddite you can learn to use your modern skis with technique that has been unchanged for decades.’ To those of us who work constantly to move our sports and the way we understand them into the future, ‘modern’ is simply consistent with our ethos as teachers, that of being engaged in a constant state of evolution. Yeah, well, sorry, I’m definitely in message honing mode. Interestingly, however, I spent this past weekend moving in precisely the opposite direction from ‘modern’, and I’m totally cool with that.

Sugarbush Resort lies in the very beautiful but small and slightly remote Mad River Valley, so it’s important occasionally to take advantage of opportunities to get out and see the wider world (yes, I did just return from New Zealand a few weeks ago, but work with me here). Last week, a few things converged all at once and I was fortunate to spend several days in the Boston area. Boston, for those who have never had the pleasure of driving there, was not exactly laid out in accordance with a grand plan by Pierre L’Enfant. There was no grand plan at all, in fact, unless there is some deeply laden secret effort to confuse anyone with less than several decades experience driving its roads. Between the twists and turns, the Charles River, the harbor, the interstate highways that run right through the center of the city, the fact that even experts in fractal geometry would fail to predict which roads are one-way and in what direction, and the fact that Bostonians are preternaturally aggressive drivers, driving in Boston can become a harrowing and quite confusing experience.

Thankfully, I’ve spent a reasonable amount of time driving in Boston over the past couple of decades and I have a solid general sense of the place. So, when I was driving into the city on my way to a pretty fun ski industry gala event last week with two friends in my car, I disdainfully dismissed the offer of help from a GPS mapping app on one of my friend’s iPhone. In fact, I can say with great pride that I was able to navigate to our destination despite not knowing its precise location faster than the iPhone would have, all while committing only one minor traffic infraction! We had some fun with it and it made for some entertainment, but it wasn’t exactly as though I was Boris Spassky beating a big computer at chess.

A few days later, however, the same issue sprung up again – my navigation skills and my apparent intransigent refusal to accept the assistance of satellites and computers. I headed from Boston to Marblehead, Massachusetts for a weekend-long series of celebrations. Driving around this classic Yankee seaport town, all craggy coastline and narrow streets surrounding the harbor densely packed with all manner of moored pleasure craft, was a very different kind of challenge to driving in Boston. Oddly, several people expressed genuine consternation when I would ask for directions or even simply and happily followed my nose. Why on earth would I not use all this wonderful technology at our finger tips? The reason given was not because it would distract my driving, at least not in the more common sense of it. The reason was that I genuinely enjoy the process of finding my way, of learning a place by sight and in the context of its natural environment, the buildings and the general ‘lay of the land’. It’s fun, and it gives me a genuine sense of a place. Besides, I never got lost even when I wasn’t precisely sure where I was, and I definitely got to see a lot of Marblehead.

I’m the same way when I ski somewhere new. I love poking around, getting a feel for the mountain itself, its rolls and gullies, its different exposures and their affect on the snow, taking in the views and getting a visceral sense of a place by skiing it. I don’t want to devolve my experience on a mountain into a quantitative experience - vertical feet skied, average speed, runs checked-off or acres covered - any more than I want to keep my nose stuck in the driving instructions I’m being given without a real awareness of the journey I’m making. Computer driven navigation can’t tell me about the cool sounds by the wind as it rolls over the summit rocks at Treble Cone, or the sounds of the cobbles under my wheels signifying the oldest part of Boston, or the smells of the sea. My point here is not merely that I want to stop and smell the flowers in the poetic sense, it is that I want the journey itself to provide stimulus, even when it’s a mundane trip. It’s about being present and aware, and it’s one of the great joys of traveling and of skiing. So, in this slightly odd state of mind, I guess I’m quite happy being a Luddite as long as I’m moving forward. And as ski and snowboard teachers, we are constantly in the wonderful mode of sharing that journey, making it about our guests and our own evolution.

Speaking of spinning my wheels, can I go skiing yet? I mean seriously, it’s been a month already and I have some exploring to do!

Marblehead, Massachusetts at sunset